June 28, 2000

OUR
SOCIOPATHIC FOREIGN POLICY: FROM KOREA TO COLOMBIA

Most
of us are either born with some sort of moral compass,
or else we acquire it along the way, but some people
are completely bereft of any moral sense. It seems
almost a congenital defect, like a baby born blind,
deaf or without any olfactory capacity. We call these
people sociopaths. Bill Clinton comes immediately
to mind, but clearly this is a bipartisan affliction,
and conservatives are hardly immune. Case in point:
columnist Jane Chastain's column in Tuesday's WorldNetDaily,
headlined "No
time to lift sanctions on North Korea."

CRAZY
LIKE A FOX

Chastain,
a radio commentator on KLTX in Los Angeles, claims that the
reconciliation talks between the two Koreas were "choreographed"
by Kim Jong Il  "North Korea's demented dictator" 
and that the whole thing was a plot by the evil North Koreans
to upgrade their nuclear weapons program. Chastain rants that:

"North
Korea President Kim Jong IL may be a little eccentric, even
crazy, but he is not stupid. For years now he has watched
his Chinese neighbors taunt the United States, even threatening
to nuke Los Angeles. What has it gotten them? Powerful concessions,
billions in a one-sided trade agreement and billions more
in outright 'assistance.'"

RADIOACTIVE
IN LOS ANGELES

Those
Los Angelenos were really shaken up by that Chinese
general who ventured to ask whether the US would be willing
to hang on to Taiwan at the price of losing Wilshire Boulevard.
But who is taunting whom across the Taiwan Strait, with the
ascension of a secessionist government in China's former province
 and the US fleet patrolling the waters right off the
Chinese coast? When the US finally gave full recognition to
the Peking government, and downgraded Taiwan's diplomatic
status, the US Congress went along with it on the condition
that we commit ourselves to the military defense of our abandoned
ally in perpetuity  a statute amounting to the de facto
annexation of the island. Taunting? Our sociopathic foreign
policy routinely humbles the national pride of proud and ancient
peoples all around the globe, and our leaders reserve the
right to violate the sovereignty of any and all nations in
the name of "humanitarianism"  but we are the
ones being taunted?

HARDBOILED

This
is a classic sociopathic symptom  deep feelings of persecution
in the mind of the persecutor, but there is also the emotional
hardness, the hardboiled attitude that dismisses and distorts
the very real results of the Korean summit:

"What
really happened there that justified such a reversal? Some
100 of the 1.2 million war refugees now living in the south
may be permitted to cross the border into North Korea for
a temporary reunion with their starving relatives, the first
such reconciliation since 1985. In return, a grateful South
Korea has agreed to give $450 million in aid to its unrepentant
northern neighbor."

KOREA
TO THE WORLD: BUTT OUT

Chastain
either doesn't know or doesn't want us to know that the very
first point agreed on by the two Korean leaders was to initiate
a process leading to reunification: "The South and the North,
as masters of national unification, will join hands in efforts
to resolve the issue of national unification independently."
This is enormously significant, for what it amounts to is
nothing less than a joint declaration of independence. Independent
not only of Korea's age-old antagonists, China and Japan,
but also of the US. As "masters of national unification,"
the Korean governments of both the North and the South were
telling the US and the world to butt out. And more
power to them. . . .

AN
OFFHAND REMARK

But
what struck me about Chastain's column was not the propagandistic
distortion and selective representation of the facts 
a routine feature of such screeds  but the offhand manner
in which the moral question of imposing sanctions on North
Korea was evaded. In painting her one-dimensional portrait
of the villainous and "demented" Kim Jong IL, Chastain writes:

"In
the face of a worsening economy and mass starvation last fall,
Kim postponed the test of his latest missile, but recently
stiffed a delegation from the International Atomic Energy
Agency that went to North Korea to make inquires about the
nuclear program we helped to build."

YUM
YUM

This
is Ms. Chastain's first  and last  mention of
the horrific famine that has North Koreans eating the bark
off the trees. To the reader who has not been following the
news from North Korea, Chastain's remark is mysterious 
because of its strange dissonance with her argument that the
North represents a powerful military force. The real mark
of propaganda is that it never provides any context, and Chastain
tells her audience next to nothing about what is really going
on in North Korea  or as little as she can get away
with. Chastain's radio show is called, ironically, "What Washington
Doesn't Want You to Know"  but what Jane Chastain doesn't
want you to know, for one, is the contents of a 1998 US congressional
study that reports two
million North Koreans died over three years of famine.
Ten percent of the population starved to death. Those who
survive live under conditions unimaginable to any Westerner.
A secret videotape smuggled out of North Korea by congressional
aides looked like something out of a horror movie, with emaciated
children permanently stunted, and too weak to even stand up,
their stick-thin bodies shaking with hunger. Weeds, corn stalks,
and grasses have found their way into the North Korean diet:
mashed into powder, these ingredients are mixed with flour
to make noodles and cakes. Sounds yummy. Perhaps Chastain
would like to try some  sorry, we're all out of soy
sauce.

WEED
NOODLES AND FRIED TREE BARK

The
photograph of Ms. Chastain at the top of her WorldNetDaily
column depicts a glossy, full-cheeked, and apparently well-fed
young lady, bright-eyed and bushy-headed, her skin exuding
radiant health: she is smiling fiercely, blood red lips parted
to show off her pearly whites. Tailored to the nines and coifed
to the max, Ms. Chastain is the perfect picture of American
prosperity. I wonder how long she would last on a diet of
weed noodles and fried tree bark? But this is the mark of
the true sociopath  a complete lack of empathy for his
(or, in this case, her) victims. The international community
is now feeding every North Korean child under the age of seven
 but Chastain is against it. According to her, we should
keep the near-total embargo on food, oil, and manufactured
goods desperately needed by starving children. With no feeling
for the real suffering of real people, Chastain can blithely
refer to "mass starvation," and then drop the subject as if
it were nothing more important than a mass outbreak of chicken
pox. A whole generation of North Koreans is wasting away in
hospitals that "have become hospices," as Mark Kirk, one of
the congressional delegation's four representatives, so succinctly
put it  but who cares? If you're a sociopath, that's
the whole point  you don't care.

INNER
DEMONS

Driven
by inner demons, ruthless and bright-eyed, the sociopathic
commentator  like the serial killer  lives in
a threatening world teeming with enemies, and swirling with
plots to subvert and perhaps even obliterate not only Los
Angeles, but the rest of the country as well. Without the
all-purpose communist villain of the cold war era, the advocates
of a paranoiac foreign policy have conjured a number of threats,
all clamoring for the attention of the public and our ever-vigilant
rulers, including but not limited to the official "rogue states"
 Serbia, Iraq, Libya, North Korea  now classified
in much more diplomatic terms as "states of concern." Colombia
has long been of concern to the US government and its corporate
sponsors, who are looking to expand and create new markets
throughout South America. It is a country rich with oil, with
mucho Colombian petro-profits being pumped into the personal
coffers
of Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore  and
Republicans like Chastain are in the vanguard of the War Party.
Now there's the spirit of "bipartisan" cooperation:
as Republican leader Trent Lott put it during
the Senate debate:

"To
those worried about slipping toward being involved (in Colombia),
where better to be involved? . . . This is a question of standing
up for our children, of standing up and fighting these narco-terrorists
in our part of the world, in our neighborhood, in our region."

THE
ANNEXATION OF SOUTH AMERICA

Our
region? Since when have we annexed the Southern Hemisphere?
Has anyone told the South Americans about this? A rogue superpower
such as the US does not take such factors into consideration
 and, once again, Jane Chastain is the perfect spokeswoman
for our sociopathic foreign policy. In a column
on the death of Capt.
Jennifer Odom, her hi-tech surveillance plane shot down
by leftist guerrillas over the Colombian jungles, Chastain's
caricatured portrait of the Colombian crisis is almost unbelievably
crude. According to her: "Capt. Odom died in an undeclared
war the United States isn't permitted to win. It's much like
the situation our troops faced in Vietnam that a younger Bill
Clinton protested."

NUKE
FARC?

What
would she have us do  send in the 82nd Airborne?
Why don't we just nuke the rebel FARC
headquarters and be done with it? The Vietnam analogy lacks
the vital prop of the cold war  a foreign sponsor. Try
as they might to sell the "war on drugs" like they sold the
holy war on international communism to justify huge military
outlays and huge profits for the "defense" industry, today's
pro-war conservatives lack the passion and conviction of their
predecessors. A war against communism at least seemed plausibly
winnable  that is, if we didn't blow up the world in
the process. But a war on drugs would have to be waged in
perpetuity  a goldmine for the new warrior class, but
a bit tiresome for the rest of us, who don't profit from "Plan
Colombia." Another big problem for the War Party is that the
evil "narco-terrorists" of South America invoked by Chastain
and her fellow Republicans don't really live up to the standards
set by the European
drug lords, such as our allies in the "disbanded" Kosovo
Liberation Army. The Colombian "narco-terrorists" are holed
up in the Colombian rainforest, while the drug lords of the
KLA are sitting in the cafes of Pristina, sipping their lattes,
secure in the knowledge that they have both the US air force
and the US Treasury at their full disposal.

EXCLUSIVELY
LOONYTOONS

But
Chastain doesn't know about context, and doesn't care. All
she knows is that "The outcome of this war not only will determine
the fate of Latin America's oldest democracy; it will determine
the fate of our inner cities as well." Oh, I see: the thugs
who groped and humiliated those women in New York's Puerto
Rican Day wilding weren't Puerto Ricans, they were Colombian
guerrillas decked out in enough gold chains and gangsta
chic to fool even their victims. A banner headline right above
Chastain's photo breathlessly informs us that this is "a WorldNetDaily
exclusive"  as if we didn't know.

STATISTICS,
DAMN STATISTICS, AND LIES

We
are told that "60 percent of the cocaine and 80 percent of
the heroin flowing into this country is produced in Colombia."
Put another way, however, this same statistic has profoundly
different implications: the US buys sixty percent of its cocaine
and 80 percent of its heroin supply from Colombia, to sate
an appetite so voracious and dependable that it has become
the mainstay of the Colombian economy. If there was no market,
there would be no production: so why are the Colombians responsible?
And will the invasion of Colombia  the core of Chastain's
game plan  cut off the supply of drugs? Of course not:
our KLA allies  who now control most of Europe's lucrative
heroin trade  would be more than happy to take US aid
money with one hand, and sell drugs to our kids with the other.

A
NIGHTMARE COME TRUE

Now
that Clinton, Gore, Lott, and Chastain have gotten their wish,
and we have jumped with both feet into the Colombian quagmire,
I wonder if any of them will have the honesty to one day rue
their decision. I wonder if any of them will have the occasion
to recall the prophetic words of Senator Slade Gorton, Republican
of Washington, one of four who voted "no" to US aid:

""The
capacity of this body for self-delusion appears to this senator
to be unlimited. There has been no consideration of the consequences,
cost and length of involvement." [The bill] lets us get into
war now and justify it later. Mark my words, we are on the
verge . . . of involvement in a civil war in Latin America,
without the slightest promise that our intervention will be
a success".

FANTASY
LAND

Gorton's
words describe the sociopathic mentality to a tee. The sociopath
lives in a fantasy world, with him at its epicenter. He is
the world's sole superpower, and thus needn't consider that
actions have consequences  for nothing can touch him,
he is godlike in his power. Hubris is the overriding emotion
and motivation of the sociopathic personality: in his ruthlessness
and utter disregard for costs, he is reckless with the money
 and the lives  of others. Chastain and her Republican
buddies in Congress, along with Clinton, really believe that
Colombia must be sacrificed "for the children"  the
children of a decadent culture who like to get high while
they fornicate and writhe to the gangsta rap beat. This is
a concept that only a true sociopath could come up with. The
emptiness of American culture, the decline of educational
standards, criminal chic, the calculated depravity of Hollywood,
the spiritual void left by a ravaging skepticism that obliterated
all values, the rootlessness of a society in which the past
is disdained and mobility in the service of the corporate
machine is the given: none of these factors could possibly
have anything to do with the prevalence of drugs in American
society, now could it?

WHAT'S
UP WITH WORLDNETDAILY?

From
Colombia to Korea, the arrogance and hubris of our rulers
is matched only by the obsequiousness and intellectual dishonesty
of their apologists and court intellectuals. It is surprising,
and disturbing, to see that WorldNetDaily, once the
flagship Internet newspaper of independent thinkers of all
types and persuasions, is running such unadulterated globalist
propaganda. I have always enjoyed WorldNetDaily as
one of the few outposts of independent thinking in the journalistic
universe, and one can only hope that this isn't a trend 
for the stakes are high and the issues complex, deserving
of a much more comprehensive and informed analysis than some
minor talk radio host seems capable of. Many of our regular
readers and contributors discovered Antiwar.com through a
link from WorldNetDaily, and I regret very much their
recent tendency to run sensationalistic stories that claim
some dire foreign threat is about to overrun us: if it isn't
the Chinese, it's the North Koreas, the Russians, the Colombian
"drug lords," the evil child molesters (who seem mostly to
be homosexuals, according to WND)  the number of threats
that have emerged recently from the pages of WND seems virtually
endless. It's enough to drive anyone who takes it seriously
quite mad  one might even say a bit sociopathic.

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